Cutting Room for November 30

Aksarben Cinema (aksarbencinema.com) must want to join Dundee Theatre (dundeetheatre.com) on the nice list this year, as the theater has also added Santa’s Cool Holiday Festival to their lineup for Dec 15-18. Chock full of quirky goodness, including the hallucinatory holiday cookie that is Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, this exciting blend of merriment and puzzlement is sure to become an annual ritual more fun than hanging stockings and less fun than chugging near-expired eggnog.

Actions speak louder than words, but numbers speak louder than verbs. So here’s some eye-popping stats provided by a recent study published by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Women bought more than 50% of domestic movie tickets in 2009, but represented only 32.8% of speaking roles in those movies. Yipes. Even worse, women made up only 21.6% of producers, 13.5% of writers and an astounding 3.9% of the directors. The study is jam-packed full of depressing info like that, all of which begs the question: when will Hollywood knock it the hell off?

Technically, this is more TV news than movie news, but I’m invoking an executive order that gives me jurisdiction over all Muppet-related information. The Jim Henson Company has just sold NBC a new human/puppet show called “The New Nabors.” It’s a single-camera comedy about a human family who gets puppet neighbors. This in no way takes the sting and shame away from NBC’s decision to bench the best show on television, “Community,” at midseason, but it is a nice first attempt an apology. Now, put these shows on back-to-back, and all is forgiven.

Cutting Room provides breaking local and national movie news … complete with added sarcasm. Send any relevant information to film@thereader.com. Check out Ryan on Movieha!, a weekly half-hour movie podcast (movieha.libsyn.com/rss), catch him on the radio on CD 105.9 (cd1059.com) on Fridays at around 7:30 a.m. and on KVNO 90.7 (KVNO.org) at 8:30 a.m. on Fridays and follow him on Twitter (twitter.com/thereaderfilm).